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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.6
EAN num: 9780486440330
ISBN number: 0486440338
Label: Dover Publications
Manufacturer: Dover Publications
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 624
Printing Date: November 18, 2004
Publishing house: Dover Publications
Sale Popularity Level: 195877
Studio: Dover Publications
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Product Description:
Trapped in a gloomy medieval fortress, an orphaned heroine battles the devious schemes of her guardians as well as her own pensive visions and melancholy fancies. Generations of readers have thrilled to this famous Gothic tale from 1794 and its hypnotic pre-Freudian exploration of the psyche.
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Rated by buyers 
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I absolutely fell in love with this book. The prose and use of the english language is breathtaking. It's a long novel (but those are my favourite kind) but it kept me up into the wee hours to see what would happen next.
I have read it many many times, I can just choose a paragraph at radom and fall into her lyrical writing.
The ultimate gothic. READ IT!
I love the picture on the cover of this Dover edition!
Rated by buyers 
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it must have been a 600+ page book with 500 pages of landscapes and 400 pages of crying-i have allowed for time spent crying while looking at landscapes-. all that aside, the story is not bad at all and, the best part, is that all the mysteries are resolved at the end of the book. no loose ends are left. yet, i still cant say that i think it is worth reading in its entirety. for the amount of story Radcliff is trying to tell, she takes an ungodly amount of paper to tell it.
Rated by buyers -
First of all, this book is not easy to read in the usual course of novels. It requires concentration and a good knowledge of the English language. Secondly, it's a very intriguing and impelling story. Usually I'm able to finish books in one day, but due to the magnitude and scope of this story, I like to finish this one in smaller bits. I come back to the story again and again, only to find that I'm just as interested as I was when I put the book down initially.
While at times the slightly annoyingly virtuous sentiment of the story can be oft-putting in large doses, it is refreshing in a sense that this book highly suggests mind over matter, rather than the usual emotional excesses of Romantic Gothic fiction. Quite different in this way from the typical Gothic novel, which makes it interesting. Not my personal choice, per se, but interesting and appealing to those who place value on logic and reason as well as the emotions.
(By the way, this Dover "thrift" edition is rather handsome for a bargain-type book. I also have "The Monk" in addition to "The Mysteries of Udolpho.")
Rated by buyers -
This is a true late eighteenth century book in the sense that it has a leisurely (very leisurely) opening, a great deal of waxing eloquent on the beauties of nature--which are well written, but so frequent that one becomes inured to them--and enough pages to fill up the four volumes that the book originally was published as (over 600 of them).
But there's more--castles, and dungeons and darkness, Oh my! In true Gothic fashion, the book does not disappoint in the gloom and suspense department, and is replete with all the trappings that make for some fun reading. There are plenty of scares and false alarms, and a couple of true horrors, and all is told with taste and style. There are certainly flaws, in the modern sense, of the drawn-out plot, and the fainting heroine routine gets a bit tired; but all in all, a fascinating study of an early novel, and a hero and heroine you root for.
The high moral tone is refreshing though a little too strained; And surprisingly, the sense of being in the late sixteenth century is not as pronounced as one could wish for. (Aside from the castles and the absence of law and order in the land, that is.) More attention could have been given to costume, for instance, instead of just landscape, but the book earns five stars in my opinion for being an immense work that is very readable, even page-turning to a remarkable degree, and has a satisfying denouement. (There are a few elements that stretch plausability, but this is certainly nothing new in fiction; and, given what the author needed to explain at the end, she does a fine job.)
Fans of the novel, of Austen and other nineteenth century authors, will find this book interesting in other ways, too. There are whispers of later works in many of the pages; one can hardly miss that Radcliffe influenced the later writers. In addition, any Regency reader worth her salt should read this book, if only because so many Regency heroines did. This Dover edition is unabridged from the original 1794, and my only niggle with it is that I waited in vain to come upon the scene on the cover of the book, but to no avail. (There are tapestries and curtains hiding fearful discoveries, for sure, but none that exactly correspond to the otherwise fitting and intriguing cover illustration.)
Notwithstanding, my advice is to get the book, and read it. You won't be sorry.
Rated by buyers -
Accomplished, refined, and beautiful, our heroine Emily St. Aubert finds herself orphaned, her finances in doubt, and surrounded by uncaring, vacuous, and social climbing relatives. Refusing to marry her true love Valancourt, she accompanies her aunt to Italy. There, they both become the prisoners of the sinister Count Montoni.
His Castle Udolpho has all the stock trappings of the Gothic: the medieval architecture, the heavy tapesteries, the veiled and oddly familiar portraits, requisite secret passages, horrible sights in the dungeons, mysterious apparitions, hinted murders, and ghostly voices. Through it all, Emily finds time to write a fair amount of poetry. (It's not for nothing the novel's subtitle is "A Romance Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry".)
Radcliffe was one of the most influential Gothic writers, and this 1794 work is generally regarded as her best.
Is it worth reading yesterday solely on its own merits? Not quite. Radcliffe's story is too long, her reveries over landscape wearisome. There is a flavor of earnest moral instruction as Emily not only struggles to master her emotions, but Radcliffe, in her contrived solutions to supernatural mysteries, is intent on stamping out the unreasonableness of superstition.
Yet, there is not just great sentiment but psychological insight too. And the ending is surprising despite the inevitable familiarity of many of the story's trappings.
Matthew Lewis _The Monk_ is much more fun, a distillation of much of Radcliffe's images and tropes into a delightfully lurid and supernatural plot. (To extend Stephen King's metaphor that the very first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole's _The Castle of Otranto_ was the genre's Elvis Presley and Lewis' novel its Sex Pistols, one is tempted to say this is its prog rock.) But students of the genre and the novel in general will want to read one of the most popular Gothics and study Radcliffe's technique -- including her somewhat clumsy backstory passages.
Finally, it would be a mistake to leave the impression this is just a novel of fear and anxiety. The love between Valancourt and Emily makes this a romance in every sense of the word.
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